More than just fifty shades of grey

LONDON: Sam Taylor-Wood is so devoted to her work she spent endless hours beside a sleeping David Beckham while making a video about the former England captain.

Now she has confessed to visiting prostitutes with Jamie Dornan, the star of her forthcoming film adaptation of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

“Jamie and I met dominants and dominatrix, just to make sure we understood that world, so that we in no way portrayed it incorrectly,” says Taylor-Wood, who hopes to have turned EL James’s best-selling erotic novel into a hit film.

The bohemian, 47-year-old artist met her second husband, actor Aaron Johnson, who is 23 years her junior, when he played John Lennon in the first film she directed, Nowhere Boy.

She admits that making raunchy Fifty Shades, which will be released next month, has taken its toll.

“I’m going out of my mind,” says Taylor-Wood, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 for Wrecked, her depiction of the last supper featuring a bare-breasted woman in the place of Christ.

“I have seen this film more than a thousand times and I’m now (like) a blancmange.”

When not quivering like a pud, she compares working on the film to being swept away on a bullet train. “The doors closed and I couldn’t get off. The speed, the velocity, was unbelievable. I need to get off and breathe and think about something else,” she says.

Dornan, who played a serial killer in The Fall, appears opposite Dakota Johnson, the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, in Fifty Shades. Johnson is said to be upset by Dakota’s role, while her grandmother, The Birds star Tippi Hedren, called it “shocking”.

Taylor-Wood has reassured fans of the novels that she has stayed true to the books, immersing herself in their every detail.

“I’ve practically eaten it. I have read it over and over. I want to protect my vision and that’s the hardest thing. There are so many voices. You have to try to keep all those people at bay. You think: you hired me because I’m a creative artist with a vision. Don’t try and knock it out of me.” – Daily Mail